FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874 1940) Castilla

Sale 2678 - Lot 24

Unsold

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000

FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874-1940)
Castilla.

Oil on canvas, 1909. 455x605 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed, inscribed "Castilla" and dated lower left, and inscribed "F. Luis Mora N.Y." verso.

Provenance
Private collection, New York.

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Additional Details

Francis Luis Mora rented a studio in Madrid after he arrived in the city in January of 1909. Mora painted at the Alhambra and the Alcázar gardens as well as made trips to Alcala, Guadiera, Granada, Segovia, Toledo, Costa Brava, and Valencia. These Spanish works were exhibited in New York upon his return.

Mora was a Uruguayan-born American figural painter. His family left Uruguay during an insurgency in 1877 and went to Catalonia, Spain, from where they soon relocated to New York. In 1880, they moved to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. At the age of fifteen Mora enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied under the American Impressionists Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson. He continued his studies at the Art Students League, New York, and during the late 1890s was working as an illustrator. In 1896 he visited Barcelona and Madrid, where at the Museo Nacional del Prado, he coincidentally met the American artist William Merritt Chase and the two spent significant time absorbing and copying the work of Diego Velázquez and other Spanish Old Masters. Back in the United States in the early 1900's Mora's career blossomed owing to his ability to translate the style of the Spanish masters to American modernist trends; he worked frequently as both an easel painter and muralist.